


Running Late

by flaming_muse



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 16:51:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3389147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flaming_muse/pseuds/flaming_muse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his friends leave the choir room, Blaine makes himself stand there on his own for what feels like an eternity.</p>
<p>set near the end of 6x07 (“Transitioning”), with absolutely no spoilers beyond</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Late

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, Blaine. My heart broke for him in 6x07... so of course then I needed to live in him for a little bit and write about his feelings. Blaine is, like all of my tight POV characters, an unreliable narrator. His first-person conclusions about events and my thoughts on events as a viewer are different things.
> 
> Thanks to Liz for the beta and the massive amounts of spiraling!

After his friends leave the choir room, Blaine makes himself stand there on his own for what feels like an eternity. It’s a kind of torture to have to wait, listening to footfalls he wants to follow drawing further and further away and finally out of his earshot entirely.

Kurt’s everywhere around him in the room, in memories and daydreams like he always has been, his handwriting bold on the whiteboard, his cologne lingering in the air, and a thousand versions of his sparkling, welcoming smile flickering like a movie behind Blaine’s eyes.

Kurt’s everywhere in the choir room, in the school, in the _world_... everywhere except beside Blaine.

As much as he needs to leave, Blaine doesn’t have a choice but to wait. He has to stare at the empty doorway that Kurt left through, has to let Sam and Rachel and Kurt and his _boyfriend_ leave the school and the parking lot, because the last thing he wants to do is run into them again. He doesn’t want to have to talk to them, not when he feels so helpless and shattered. He doesn’t want to have to _see_ them, the four of them, Kurt on his double date, a perfect little group - two by two, couples, two sides of a cozy booth - full of happiness and without a place for him if he isn’t part of a couple of his own.

There’s no place beside Kurt for him, not anymore.

Every minute he stands rooted to the spot where instead of pouring his heart out he’d let it fall - unexposed and unwanted - to the floor makes Blaine feel that much worse. There are too many memories crowding him, too many regrets, too much said and unsaid, words echoing in his ears. Words of love, words of anger, words he never was able to say at all.

His skin crawls with the need to go, but there’s nowhere to go. Nowhere he wants to go, anyway.

Still, when he thinks enough time has passed, he walks to his car - so much more slowly than how he left it; he has no reason to run anymore - and drives away, because if there’s nowhere to go, no home or loving arms to take him in, there are plenty of places with fewer brutally vivid memories than McKinley where he can feel just how stupid he has been.

Blaine’s breath shakes out of him, barely a sound above the hum of the car’s engine.

Kurt had been right to complain again and again that Blaine was always running late and making him wait, he realizes with a sick lurch of his stomach. The realization is too late, too, of course. He was late for dates and dinners, late to fall in love with Kurt the first time, late to realize mistakes he was making, and now too late to get him back.

Kurt waited for him so many times, not always patiently but always there when Blaine caught up.

But Blaine was _so_ very late this time, and Kurt - just like Blaine asked him to - is no longer waiting for him.

Blaine pulls his car over on a quiet street and shuts it off, curling his hands over the steering wheel and leaning his head back against the seat. He closes his eyes, but nothing he can do can close his heart again.

He doesn’t even know how he feels. He’s lost and empty but also relieved somehow, not that he didn’t get to share his heart with Kurt - which is such an agony that it makes him feel like that very heart has been cut completely out of him - but relieved that he finally _understands it_.

He’s been telling himself for so long that his affection was for Dave and only Dave that none of the ways he’s been being pulled back into Kurt’s orbit have made any sense. He’s been telling himself that tug toward Kurt didn’t mean anything, couldn’t mean anything, nothing but the fact that their friendship is too strong to be broken by all of the ways they’ve hurt each other.

But as much as he cared for Dave’s gentle kindness and good humor, beneath it all, beneath his attraction to that other man and all of the pain of being rejected by Kurt, beneath everything, Blaine’s heart still beats to the music of Kurt’s very existence, and he understands that now.

He loves Kurt.

No matter what happens, he’ll always love Kurt, deeply and undeniably.

It’s a bitter kind of relief to know it instead of being pulled apart and confused by trying not to listen to his own heart.

It’s good to _know_.

He squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and sees Kurt walking out of that choir room door in his mind, over and over, away from him and toward his boyfriend and his friends and the new life he’s building without Blaine by his side. The life where Blaine is welcome to be there with him but cannot be _his_.

Blaine’s next breath out isn’t _quite_ a choked off noise of disappointment in himself, of sadness he can’t contain. He’s been so stupid, telling himself and everyone around him - telling _Kurt_ , who _believed him_ \- that he was over him when he just hadn’t been listening to himself at all. Yes, Blaine had been hurt, yes, he’d found someone else he cared about, but that wasn’t _all_ his heart had been saying. It wasn’t what his heart has always said about Kurt.

He can’t believe it took him so long to figure it out.

As much as Blaine feels like he’s grown and changed since they split apart, as much as he’s learned, as much as he feels like the ground beneath his feet and the very bones in his body are stronger and steadier than they were even a few months ago, he’s still apparently the same person inside.

He still loves Kurt, and he still is late for him. Always and forever late.

His heart has always been too slow where Kurt is concerned.

Blaine looks at his hands on the steering wheel, washed out in the evening gloom. If he hadn’t been late for that fateful dinner in New York and pushed Kurt over that last horrible edge, there would have been a wedding ring on his finger by now. If he hadn’t been late discovering the truth of his heart, if he’d been able to hear Kurt’s desire to get him back with an open mind even through his own pain, Kurt would have been his again already.

But Blaine had been late, again and again.

He needed time to figure himself out, and he knows that was a good choice, but he took too much.

Kurt wasn’t there waiting by the time Blaine caught up.

It’s no one’s fault but Blaine’s own.

Blaine’s hands flex around the wheel, holding on, holding himself together, and holding himself back from driving to Breadstix and saying what he didn’t before. He can do that much. Kurt deserves that much.

Blaine might still be in love with Kurt, but he can’t force it on him, not when Kurt has someone else by his side: a handsome, successful, and apparently punctual man who hasn’t lied to himself about Kurt’s value in his life.

How could Blaine say anything when Kurt’s been so respectful of _him_?

Kurt listened to him, accepted the friendship Blaine had been stupid enough to think was all he wanted to offer, and moved on. Kurt’s been attentive and fun, friendly and playful, but he hasn’t asked for more since that first night. Blaine let him go, and Kurt slowly but surely went.

The good news, such as it is, is that while Blaine’s lateness used to hurt Kurt over and over again, this time it is only hurting himself.

Kurt, at least, is happy.

That is what Blaine wants most of all.

Fighting to keep himself from tearing up, Blaine starts up the car with shaking hands and checks his phone out of habit. There’s a text from Dave, telling him he’s staying with a friend tonight and that Blaine shouldn’t be afraid to come back to the apartment if he wants to.

Blaine’s mouth crumples. The kindness only hurts, but he’s grateful all the same.

Dave has only been kind. From the beginning he listened to Blaine. He cared for him. He trusted him. Dave hadn’t even cared that Blaine had sung with Kurt, and Blaine was too late to realize that, too. He’d warned Kurt that Dave would be upset, but of course Dave wasn’t upset. It was Blaine who knew what singing meant, after all. He knew what singing with _Kurt_ meant. He knew it deep in his heart even if he hadn’t been willing to admit it.

Sitting alone in the dark on a side street somewhere in Lima, Blaine wonders how he could have learned so much about himself over the past few months and still be so late in understanding what is important.

Taking a deep breath, Blaine puts the car into drive and pulls away from the curb. He doesn’t really have a home now that they’ve broken up, and he can’t go backwards with Dave, but he can’t stay here on the street all night. He’ll go back to the apartment and figure out what comes next.

He doesn’t know what it will be.

All he knows, with the sharp pain of breathtaking clarity that has come too late, is that it won’t be with Kurt.

**Author's Note:**

> Reminder: I am spoiler-free! Please do not spoil me for anything coming ahead!


End file.
